New film introduces an Iowa treasure who tells tough truths through his poems

He's softspoken, but Iowa City Spoken Word poet Caleb Rainey's words are profound, and can be jolting. Nik Heftman's film, "The Negro Artist" offers moving context.

“I don't remember the first time I was called nigger,” begins the first entry in Caleb Rainey’s first book of spoken-word poems. “ I remember the first time I wasn't.”

I remember the first time I saw Rainey recite that piece from “Look, Black Boy,” and watched his facial expressions change as the story unfolded. In those moments, the 30-year-old poet and author was again the nerdy 15-year-old Black boy in a white school. On that day, he was pumped because Brad, a cool, confident kid on the soccer team spoke to him in the parking lot.

But the moment was short-lived. A car drove by “from the hood, trap rattling the pack of black boys sitting inside.” The dimpled smile gives way to wide-eyed confusion, which yields to scrunched-face angst as, “Brad rolls his eyes, says to me, ‘ Man I hate niggers, good thing you’re not one of them.’

“ I wonder then who I have been. Am I a nigger?”

Poet Caleb Rainey (Left) and filmmaker Nik Heftman. Photo by Rekha Basu

As the poem unfolds, Rainey recalls times he was rapping along to songs in cars with cousins, encountering aggressive police, or a degrading teacher, and the distrustful father of a girl he liked in junior high. Looking back, he wonders more.

“Am I?”

The first time Los Angeles-based CBS News producer Nik Heftman heard Rainey recite it at a 2022 Okoboji Writers Retreat, it struck a chord. Heftman is also 30 and Black, also graduated from an Iowa college and also faced micro-aggressions growing up, in his case in Southern California. He recalls white kids telling him, “I don’t see you as black,” as if that rendered him worthy.

But under which circumstances?

The poem also stirred discomfort. While Rainey was using his art to share painful reckonings on race, Heftman was building his own media business, The Seven Times. He was producing short films on successful Black entrepreneurs. But unlike Rainey who, he says, “had the courage to stand up in a room full of white people and tell the truth,” Heftman let his subjects do the telling. He shied away from putting himself out there, or addressing divisive political topics.

A chance encounter at the retreat would impact both of their journeys. Rainey got locked out of his hotel room one night and ended up staying in Heftman’s. Spending time together and keeping in touch later grew Heftman’s respect for Rainey’s craft. He learned that in addition to performing around the country, Rainey produces an open mic show, House of Words, to help launch other Iowa poets, musicians and comedians. He also runs Iowa City Speaks, a nonprofit, where he teaches Spoken Word poetry to students from across the school district.

Heftman saw that Rainey, who is softspoken and exudes warmth, doesn’t just talk the talk. He walks the walk. And his directness on stage made Heftman realize “I needed to challenge my video story telling.”

The upshot is the nearly hour-long film about Rainey called “The Negro Artist,” the title Rainey first took on at the University of Iowa. When it premiered at the Pearson Lakes Art Center during the last Okoboji Writer’s Retreat in September, there was hardly a dry eye in the auditorium.

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The Negro Artist will be screened Dec. 11 at 7 p.m. at Filmscene in Iowa City’s Hotel Chauncey: www.icfilmscene.org and Jan. 10 at 8 p.m. at XBK in Des Moines: www.xbklive.com

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Rainey was born to a Black father and a white mother who met as college students in Columbia, Missouri — a state he calls “the Midwest that really wants to be the South.” Being biracial in a country that has so polarized Blacks and whites added a layer of complexity to forging an identity. His mother’s family mostly disowned her over the marriage, her maternal grandmother questioning, “Why would you do that to your children?” (She finally came around after the first one was born.)

Rainey’s early school years were spent mostly in “white spaces.” By high school, he was, he says, “too Black for the white kids,” who called him “articulate” (code for not like other Blacks), “palatable” and smarter than he looked. He was too white for the Black kids for the qualities “not ascribed to Black folks” in which he took refuge: Reading and writing. As he puts it, “You’re always navigating your identity by what the rest of the world is telling you you are.”

His father was the first in his family to graduate from college, and though they generally accepted the marriage, his father’s sister asked Caleb’s mother when they met why she was taking away one of the ”good ones.” Caleb’s mother mostly stayed away from their family gatherings when Caleb was in his teens.

His family was insular but close knit. Within their walls, nightly dinners were the place to take the issues and sometimes indignities of the day. It was over dinner that Caleb first told of his ninth-grade government teacher crumpling up his work and tossing it in the trash in front of him (the subject of another poem). It was to the safety of the nest that his father returned one evening after leaving a dinner outing before the others, and getting pulled over by a cop, then let go. More than likely, he’d committed the offense of Driving While Black.

In seventh grade, Caleb was tapped for a talent program, and started taking summer college courses at the University of Iowa, where storytelling became his passion. It was there that he began dreaming of performing his spoken word work.

Now he does that while also teaching the art form to other young people through his nonprofit. I asked if he worried about fostering what some people of color fear is cultural appropriation.

He thought about it, then said, “If there is, somewhere, a white high school boy trying to sound like a Black rapper, I would still water him as a plant.”

I also asked him about using the N-word out loud in performances – a word so steeped in a history of violent hatred that even my computer won’t type it as I dictate this. Yes, some older Black listeners, wary that it could give white people license to use it, have objected, he said,

But let’s put this in context. The offensive part isn’t Rainey using the word to illustrate his pain. It’s a white kid he looked up to using it to keep a Black kid in his place. By repeating it, Rainey sheds the shame and stigma he carries from it, and reclaims the power it gave someone else to hurt him.

These days, it sometimes seems a miracle that any 30-year-old can forge a strong sense of self amid the economic and political uncertainties, animosities and scapegoating amplified over social media. Rainey isn’t just a spellbinding performer. At his age, he’s giving critical voice to younger people to find and speak their truths and enlighten the rest of us.

That’s who Caleb Rainey is, in case anyone was still wondering: An Iowa treasure, soon to be a national one after this uplifting, empowering film crisscrosses the country.

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